The Tundra Trials

by Monica Tesler

  We need a plan. Now.

  “What are we going to do?” I whisper.

  Marco shrugs. “Wiki?”

  “We need to ask directions. Someone around here must have a voice-translation box.”

  “Right,” I say, although the last thing I want to do is walk into one of the small coves filled with Tunnelers and try to communicate. Since Cole hasn’t moved a muscle since he made the suggestion, I’m guessing he feels about the same.

  “Let’s do it, then,” Marco says. He takes five strides toward the nearest cove, glares over his shoulder at us, then keeps going.

  We can’t let him fly solo on this. I grab Cole’s arm and drag him after Marco.

  Even though the cove has no door, it’s clear where the threshold is. The Tunnelers are in, and we’re out. Three stone tables stretch the length of the room, with long benches pulled underneath. At least fifty Tunnelers huddle around the tables, drinking dark liquid from small bowls and blowing into pots that burn thick, dark smoke. Marco stands at the threshold for a solid count of ten, but none of the Tunnelers make any sign of acknowledgement.

  “Hi, there!” Marco shouts across the threshold.

  No reaction. If I had to guess, I’d say they were ignoring him.

  “Here goes nothing,” Marco says and steps across the threshold.

  Instantly the Tunnelers leap to their feet and shriek like Neeka did earlier, but this time it’s not funny at all. They charge the threshold, shrieking and hissing and baring their teeth.

  Marco jumps back with his palms in the air. “Whoa, whoa, chill. I didn’t mean to make you so mad. See, my friends and I are lost. We just need to ask directions. . . .”

  The Tunnelers rush right to the threshold and keep up their shriek attack. I want to run away, but that wouldn’t make it better. We’d still be lost, and we might have fifty angry Tunnelers on our tail.

  “Hey!” Marco shouts. “Cool it! We just need directions! Don’t any of you have voice boxes?”

  None of the Tunnelers seem to understand anything Marco’s saying. Some of them stop shrieking, but all of their lips are still curled, and their pointy teeth look pretty sharp.

  Cole steps in front of Marco. “Kerr—accck. Grrrr—nok, Earth Force!”

  The Tunnelers grunt among themselves and exchange curious glances.

  “Kerr—acck. Grrr—nok, Earth Force!” Cole tries again.

  “What are you saying to them?” I ask.

  “We are officers of Earth Force. Or, actually, it’s probably more like we top people.”

  “We top people?” Marco asks. “Great. They’re probably shrieking because of how ridiculous you sound.”

  “And you should work on your accent,” I say.

  “I don’t see either of you coming up with a better idea,” Cole says.

  An older-looking Tunneler with a black streak in his hair and a deep scar across his face splits the crowd and steps across the threshold. He heads down the tunnel the way we came.

  I lift my eyebrows at Marco and whisper, “What do we do?”

  Marco shrugs.

  The older Tunneler stops, slips something around his neck, and turns around. He grunts quietly, and then a hyper-robotic voice says, “Are you coming or not?”

  “He’s wearing a voice box,” I say.

  “It’s the original beta model,” Cole says.

  “You heard him,” Marco calls as he runs after the Tunneler. “Let’s go!”

  Cole and I catch up with Marco. The old Tunneler is moving so fast, we have to jog to keep up. How can he move that fast all stooped over?

  “Hey! Thanks!” Marco says. “I didn’t know what we were going to do back there.”

  The Tunneler quietly grunts. “Keep your voice down,” booms the old voice box. “Holy Hovercraft, why don’t they have a volume setting on these things?”

  “Holy hovercraft?” I whisper to Cole and Marco.

  “I heard that,” the Tunneler says. “And that’s not what I said. They don’t have an English translation for it. Some joker programmed the box to translate Tunneler expletives into the most annoying human colloquialisms imaginable.”

  “But yet it actually translates an insane phrase like ‘the most annoying human colloquialisms imaginable,’ ” Marco says.

  “Go figure, wise guy,” the Tunneler says.

  “So do you mean I’m a smart dude or were you using the annoying human colloquialism wise guy?”

  I elbow Marco and mouth, Shut up. I’d rather him quit being a wise guy than us stay lost.

  Cole jogs alongside the Tunneler. “Hello, or should I say, Argotok? My name is Cole. And these are my friends Jasper and Marco. We just arrived this afternoon on the space elevator. I fear we’re lost.”

  “Your fears are right, Earth Boy. A few more meters in the wrong direction, and you may never have made it back.”

  Well, that’s comforting.

  “Your luck—not mine—put you in my path,” he continues. “I’ll take you to the Earth Sector and be on my way.”

  The Tunneler dips his head and speeds up again. I get the feeling that he doesn’t want anyone to notice him. He really is running low on luck. It’s hard not to get noticed when you’re escorting three human kids along the back channels of Gulagaven.

  We chase after him through several twists and turns. We never would have made it to the Bounder Burrow on our own.

  “Why do you have that old voice-translation box?” Cole asks.

  “None of your business.”

  “I didn’t think they were still in circulation.”

  “They’re not.”

  “Then why do you have one?”

  “Can’t you take a hint, Earth Boy?” The Tunneler slows down. “Are you Waters’s kids?”

  “How do you know that?” I ask.

  “I heard you were coming today. If I didn’t have a hunch who you were, you’d still be back there hovering at the entrance of our members-only drinking establishment.”

  “Drinking establishment?” Marco ask. “That was a Tunneler bar?”

  “Let’s not get off track,” Cole says. “How exactly do you know Waters?”

  The Tunneler ignores Cole’s question and turns around. “You’ll find your Bounder friends around the next bend. I’ve brought you far enough.”

  “Wait!” Cole shouts. “Who are you? How do you know Waters?”

  Just then, up ahead, a Gulagan Earth Force officer turns the corner. He takes one look at us and starts yelling. I’m sure he’s shouting at Cole, Marco, and me until his voice box starts translating.

  “Hey! What are you doing here, Barrick? You’re not allowed in Gulagaven, old man. You’re going—”

  I’m not sure what else he says, because he turns off his voice box. He runs full speed and nearly knocks me over. That’s when I realize the old Tunneler, who I guess is named Barrick, is no longer around. He must have bolted as soon as the officer started shouting.

  “Whoa,” Marco says. “That was unexpected.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He took off in the direction of the market, I think,” Cole says.

  “We never even got to say thanks.”

  “Adams! Thompson! Romero!” a familiar voice calls. “Where have you been? We have search parties out for you.”

  When I spin back around, Earth Force Officer James Ridders is marching toward us.

  “You should have been at the burrow over an hour ago,” Ridders continues. “Explain yourself.”

  “It’s a pretty basic explanation, sir,” Marco says. “We got lost.”

  Ridders shakes his head. He opens his mouth to speak a few times, then eventually says, “Fine. But let this be a warning. You’ll get no preferential treatment from me. You’re here to do your duty, just like the rest of us. See to it that you stay in line.”

  “Yes, sir,” we say in unison.

  “The burrow is around the corner. It’s close coed quarters. No nonsense.”

  Coed qua
rters? As in we’ll be sleeping in the same room as the girls? That will be . . . different.

  “And, gentlemen,” Ridders says with a nod, “welcome back to the EarthBound Academy.”

  We swing around the corner, and I immediately recognize where we are. Across the chasm and up one level is the hallway leading to the market. Geez. How did we miss this? If we’d only kept walking instead of taking that turn, we never would have gotten lost.

  A few more steps take us to the Bounder Burrow. Before I have a chance to look around, Lucy barrels across the room and slams into me, wrapping her arms around my back. “Oh, thank goodness! Why did you separate from us? We thought you were lost!” From the way she’s clinging to me, you’d think we hadn’t seen each other since last tour, as opposed to having spent the last week together at Waters’s labs.

  “We were lost,” Cole says. He stands straight as a board when Lucy hugs him.

  “Where’s my hug?” Marco asks.

  “You don’t need one,” she says. “There are a lot of people here waiting to hug you.”

  Sure enough, while Lucy hugged and lectured us, a small crowd gathered around. When she finally steps aside, a field of familiar faces, all clad in indigo and orange, stands in front of me.

  A round boy with orange hair and freckles elbows his way to the front. “Hi, Jasper!”

  “Ryan!” I grab his fist and bump his shoulder with my own, the same move I’ve watched Marco do a hundred times. “You bring your rocks this tour?”

  “Nah,” he says. “I opted for my Evolution figure collection.” He aims this last remark at Cole beside me. “Want to see?”

  “Let’s go,” Cole says.

  “Maybe later,” I say, but Cole and Ryan are already dashing off.

  I stick with Marco and try to hang in for the wave after wave of Bounders coming to say hello. He takes it in stride, but I’m a little freaked by it all. Something is definitely different this time around. Sure, we all know one another, so it’s not like our first days at the space station. But that’s not all that’s different. A couple of cadets kid about the Paleo Planet and my dive off the Youli spaceship. Except they’re not really kidding. I can tell they’re impressed, even a bit in awe of me. Everything’s compounded by our pod arriving late to the tour and the rumors about the new technology.

  We’re shrouded in mystery, and I kind of like it.

  “. . . he still makes me nervous,” Meggi is saying when I tune back in. I feel kind of bad—Meggi is Lucy’s friend, and she’s always been nice to me—but she was probably saying the same stuff as everybody else. How was your summer? You didn’t miss much at the space station. Did you hear Maximilian Sheek took Florine’s job as head of Bounder Affairs? And when she says he makes her nervous, I’m pretty sure she’s talking about Marco.

  “Oh, Marco is harmless,” I say. “And that stuff from last tour is old news.”

  “Not really,” she says. “All anyone wants to talk about is the Youli battle on the Paleo Planet, and your pod is the all-star team who just so happened to arrive fashionably late to our second tour.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Is it true about Waters? Did he invent a new weapon?”

  “What? No!” Does she know about the brain patch? I rub the back of my neck, then realize I’m being the opposite of discreet and quickly lower my arm and clench my hands at my back.

  Meggi looks at me quizzically.

  Wait a second. If there are rumors about Waters and a new invention, they’re probably about the BPS. “I mean, we’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she whispers. “I promise.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just—”

  Ka. Ka. Gorneen Konteer Arrr. Neeka elbows her way through the crowd. “Oh! Oh! Thank the stars above! I thought I was going to be in so much trouble. Oh! Even now, if Father finds out that I let you boys go off on your own . . . Oh! I don’t even want to think about what will happen. He might make me give up the junior ambassadorship!”

  “Don’t worry, Neeka. We’ll tell your father it was all our fault.”

  “Oh! Thank you!” Neeka says. “Now come with me. I need to show you your hovel.”

  “Our what?”

  Neeka does something funny with her eye—Is she winking at me?—then links one arm in mine and the other in Marco’s and pulls us away from the other cadets. I wave to Meggi and mouth, Sorry.

  Once we leave the crowd, I can actually see the burrow. It reminds me of a cave. It’s a large, hollowed-out indentation with a half-dome ceiling and the standard mud walls, like the cove where we found Barrick, only three times as big. Looking closer, I notice a bunch of smaller holes lining the edges of the burrow. Those must be the hovels. Yep, a rack of bunks stacked three high lines both walls of each hovel we pass. And from the looks of the occupants, the boys have one side of the burrow, and the girls have the other.

  When we pass Ryan’s hovel, Neeka waves Cole along with us. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Since you didn’t arrive with the others, you got last choice for bunks.”

  We collect our duffels, dump our blast packs at the charging station, and head to the hovels. Neeka slows to a stop just before the last one in the row.

  “This looks like a good location,” I say. “Near the back, lots of privacy.”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Neeka says, turning the volume down on her voice box, “but I think no one wanted to share space with the boys who claimed these bunks first.”

  My stomach churns. Who haven’t I seen yet?

  Regis.

  10

  “THIS IS GOING TO BE fun.” Marco steps into the hovel.

  I cross the last few feet so I can see inside. Sure enough, Regis, Hakim, and Randall stare back from their bunks.

  “Get out,” Regis says from the top bunk. “I already told them we won’t share with you.”

  “Looks like you’re out of options, Hotshot,” Marco says. “You had twenty-four hours to find other bunk mates. You didn’t.”

  “And it looks like we’ll have to pay for it,” I say.

  “What’s that, Jasper?” Regis asks, hopping down from the bunk. “You’re away from the Academy for a few months and think you can come back here with an attitude?”

  “I’m the one with the attitude? Why do you think no one wants to bunk with you?”

  Hakim and Randall jump to their feet.

  “Is that how you see it?” Randall says, jerking his face and fists forward, trying to make me flinch. Hakim puffs his chest and gives me the stink eye.

  “Forget it,” I say. “If we have to bunk with you, let’s make the best of it.”

  “We’ll start with this,” Regis says. “The left side is ours. The right side is yours. Don’t cross the center line.” He struts out of the hovel, gesturing for his groupies to follow.

  When they’re gone, I take a deep breath. My exhale comes out in a stutter. Why do I still let him bother me?

  “How did this happen?” Cole asks. “Why do we have to bunk with them?”

  I don’t have time to reply before Ridders shouts, “Lights out.” Neeka grunts a quick good night and scurries away. We divvy up the right-side bunks in the hovel—Marco on the bottom, Cole in the middle, and me on the top. I have the most headroom, which is why I claimed the top bunk, but I’ll be staring at Regis all night.

  As of now, though, there’s no sign of Regis. Are they going to miss head count? Ridders will slaughter them.

  We change out of our uniforms and shove our duffels under the bottom bunk.

  At the last second, the dimwits slip in. Randall rattles my bunk before jumping into his own. All three of them burst out laughing.

  Ridders shows up at the foot of our hovel with his tablet in hand. “Quiet!”

  Something tickles my foot. Then my thigh.

  “Count off,” Ridders commands. “Left to right, top to bottom.”

  Maybe the blanket’s just scratchy.

  “One!” Regis shouts.
r />   There it is again. A tickle.

  “Two!” yells Hakim.

  A prickle. Both legs.

  “Three!” shouts Randall.

  My boxers. My belly.

  “Ahhh!” I shoot up in bed and throw off the blanket. “Get them off!” I thrash and kick and shriek. “They’re crawling all over me!”

  “What is going on?” Ridders demands. He shines a flashlight at my bunk.

  Dozens of creepy-crawly caterpillars scurry across my bed.

  I leap off my bunk, screaming, and brush the critters from my body.

  By now, Marco and Cole are both out of bed and trying to help.

  Cole plucks a particularly fat caterpillar from my hair. “These are the kind they were selling as snacks in the market.”

  Great, now I feel creeped out and sick to my stomach.

  “Romero!” Ridders shouts. “Get those insects out of his bed!”

  Marco strips the sheets and shakes them out. Meanwhile, one of the plebes must have called for assistance, because a Tunneler arrives with a broom and sweeps the crawlers out of the hovel.

  With Cole’s help, I check my body at least ten times. It looks like I’ve rid myself of every last bug, but I can’t shake the feeling that something’s crawling on me. Every few seconds, I shudder.

  Once my bed is back in order, Ridders fixes me with a stern stare. “You caused enough racket to wake all of Gulagaven, Jasper. Perhaps you didn’t hear me earlier. I have zero tolerance for your pod’s antics. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” I want to protest—he saw the bugs; he knows why I freaked—but I keep my mouth shut.

  “No more noise! All of you!” Ridders says to our hovel.

  As soon as Ridders moves on to the girls’ side of the burrow, Regis whispers in a mocking voice, “You caused enough racket to wake all of Gulagaven, Jasper.” He and his minions explode with laughter.

  “Hope you liked the welcome gift,” Randall says.

  That’s right. Randall rattled my bunk just before Ridders showed up. “You planted those things?”